From Whence Does Your Morality Come?

I believe that humans are fully capable of understanding and defining moral behavior, but I question the source of their definition of what is moral.

Have you ever watched the behaviors of young children? It doesn’t take long for selfishness, lying, cheating, and other ‘bad’ behaviors to manifest themselves. The interesting question for me is, where in their beginning of life did they learn these ‘bad’ behaviors? Nobody I’ve ever heard about or know willfully teaches their children to do bad things. From the time they are toddlers (or possibly younger), the bad behavior appears to be a natural (self) manifestation.

Yes it’s true. We as adults spend an inordinate amount of our time and effort in teaching children to share, tell the truth, play fairly, show respect, do their best, etc. But where did we get the idea that the bad behaviors they displayed were wrong to begin with? Our parents taught us, their parents taught them….and it goes back to the beginning of human existence. Quite simply, someone has to teach us what is right and wrong.

I believe that the seeds of that instruction go back to the God of creation and that everything ‘good’ comes from Him. That which is ‘bad’ comes from within mankind itself.

Someone recently wrote to me in response to a piece I wrote that “we all create reality together and that our essential responsibility is to understand and explore our inner environment relative to our external environment”. My response is to agree that we all create our reality, but there is a “but” embedded in my agreement.

When I take a look at our world, the reality that mankind has created doesn’t match up to goodness (as a whole), though there may be patches of goodness found.

In addition, when I think of what one might call an ‘inner environment’ and how that inner environment affects our outer environment, I think of the heart or soul of a person. If we all had pure hearts, wouldn’t that mean a world with no evil?

Which brings me back to my original question, who defines good and evil? What is seen as ‘good’ in one man can be seen as evil in another.

My major position is that only a perfect being can define what is good (moral) and what is bad (immoral). Since none of us is perfect, that morality has been defined elsewhere, by a perfect God, not imperfect man.

Mankind does have power in his or her own right — but that power is limited to rejecting or accepting the morality that God has eternally ordered.